PAST IS PROLOGUE

PAST IS PROLOGUE; Locked Out in '64, Rebel Mississippi Delegates Get Front Row in '04

By JOHN HERBERS

Published: July 25, 2004

FORTY years ago this summer, the Democrats met in Atlantic City and put on a televised spectacle that helped shape the politics of the day and the long-range effects of the civil rights movement. The clash over whether the national party would seat white segregationists or integrated freedom fighters from Mississippi is considered such an important milestone of party history that it will be commemorated at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

The star of the event was Fannie Lou Hamer, a black woman who was 46 at the time. The historian Taylor Branch described her as the 20th child of sharecroppers, ''semiliterate in all subjects except biblical wisdom.'' Her testimony before the credentials committee about being beaten by law enforcement officials for urging blacks to vote in her hometown was seen on television by millions of Americans.

Mrs. Hamer was asking that delegates of the upstart Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party be seated in place of the regular all-white delegation.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had recently pushed through Congress the landmark act barring racial discrimination in public accommodations. But he feared that seating the Freedom Democrats would set off a walkout of delegates from Southern and border states. And if that happened, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, still grieving from the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, might sweep in and make an emotional bid for the presidential nomination.

College students throughout Mississippi had mobilized in support of voting rights for blacks. But the white resistance to desegregation was so strong in that ''Freedom Summer'' that the black and white leaders of the movement believed their best chance of prevailing was to turn to politics. At the time, there was still a ''solid South,'' Democratic in name but opposed to civil rights. Virtually all of the regular Mississippi delegates to the convention said they would vote in the fall for Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, because of his opposition to federal civil rights legislation.

Robert Moses, a black math teacher from New York, formed the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of several civil rights groups working in Mississippi. The council named an integrated delegation, a mix of civil rights leaders and poor people, that arrived in Atlantic City in August. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of national rights organizations supported their challenge.

At the convention, they found that the White House had sought to mute their testimony by assigning the hearing to a room so small it could not accommodate full television coverage. Only after the networks protested were the proceedings moved to a larger area.

Mrs. Hamer, limping to the stand, told in graphic detail of growing up in the cotton fields, and of beatings and threats against her and other blacks. And, she said: ''I feel sorry for anybody that could let hate wrap them up. Hate will only destroy us. It will destroy them.''

After marathon bargaining sessions, the White House offered a compromise: The regular delegates could remain, but two Freedom Democrats would be seated as voting delegates at large.

Civil rights leaders were split on whether the proposal should be accepted. Dr. King equivocated. But Mr. Moses and most of his delegates rejected it. ''We're not here to bring politics to our morality, but morality to our politics,'' Mr. Moses said.

Two Freedom Party delegates, Aaron Henry and Edwin King, accepted the compromise and joined the convention as voting delegates. Gov. Paul Johnson of Mississippi, in anger, called home the regular delegates.

The next year, thousands of volunteers from throughout the nation, both black and white, descended on Alabama to help bring about the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That was a catalyst for change in the politics of the South. Blacks began to be elected to public offices on the local, state and Congressional levels. Many white voters in the South switched en masse to the Republican Party.

This week, as it has since 1964, Mississippi is sending a racially integrated delegation to the national convention. Rickey Cole, a state party spokesman, said 41 delegates and 6 alternates, 60 percent of them African-Americans, would be in Boston, including one of the 1964 Freedom Party delegates, Emma Sanders, a retired public schoolteacher.

Photos: Fannie Lou Hamer, left, of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. One veteran, Emma Sanders, above, will be in Boston. (Photo by Wesley Ellis for The New York Times); (Photo by Associated Press)

John Herbers covered the civil rights movement during the 1960's and 70's for The New York Times.